The general repercussion in the Federal Supreme Court: an examination in the period of 2011 to 2016

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to examine the institute of general repercussion as an instrument used by the Brazilian Supreme Court to effectively become a constitutional court: judging only issues of great economic, social and political relevance. As well as providing a true reduction to the Court stock, with a significant impact on the Brazilian constitutional control standards. The goal of the research is to verify the existence of use of expressions of foreign law in the legal arguments of the Judges of the Supreme Court and the reason for this use. The relevance of this verification is semiological: originally and structurally individual demands becames a referential decision and, therefore, applicable to hundreds or thousands of similar processes. Using the deductive method, the article is divided into three parts: the first one contemplates the verification of the transforming external agents of the role of the Judiciary in the brazilian contemporaneity culminating with the introduction of the general repercussion as a true instrument of abstractivization of the constitutional control. Afterwards, the procedural and material aspects of the institute of general repercussion will be identified, in order to finally examine the content of the discourse used in the votes of the Judges, essentially as regards the expressions of foreign law and their role in argumentative structuring of the vote.